Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
dubbed the bills “the 'prostate' in honour of his afflicted organ.” The soldiers who received them
as pay rioted again, ransacking the country's businesses. Foreign entrepreneurs who underpinned
what remained of the economy finally left. In rural areas, the disintegration of roads and infrastruc-
ture as well as the disappearance of schools and medical services caused people to flee to the cities,
intensifying the chaos.
This was what Albert's
passage à vide
evoked, the search not only for opportunities amid over-
whelming exploitation but for a new way of doing things. The name Lokasola, he told me, sitting
across from me in the BCI office for well over two hours now, “means trailblazer. And Lotana is
someone who is found in his place, someone who doesn't move. Things come to him. He does not
go looking.” And yet, during that time, he had never felt so bereft of his gifts. Until then his life,
like his father's, had seemed charmed.
He told himself that he couldn't miss any opportunities, that he had to be vigilant. In Kinshasa,
he spoke to everyone, trying to imagine new ways of surviving. He and his family were living with
his brother-in-law in the Bon Marché neighborhood when he heard about Floribert Botamba, a man
from Bosenge, a village not far from Kokolopori. He'd been working at Georgia State University
with bonobos, and had only just returned to Kinshasa for a conference. Though Sally Jewell Coxe
didn't know Albert yet, she'd been involved with primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's programs,
which were then being done at Georgia State, and had even driven Botamba to the Atlanta airport,
paying his extra baggage fees so he could bring more home to his family.
At the conference in Kinshasa, Botamba gave a presentation about language studies with
bonobos. Albert was in the audience when Botamba showed a video about Savage-Rumbaugh's
work. Seeing it, he felt possibilities begin to open up, the sense that he might create a project that
offered him not only autonomy but creative and intellectual stimulation. He'd grown up in forests
where bonobos lived, and in 1974, his uncle had introduced the Japanese primatologist Takayoshi
Kano to the village of Wamba. Albert knew that bonobos were a charismatic species, and watching
the video, he found himself riveted. The folklore of Kokolopori said that men and bonobos once
lived together, but he had never realized the extent of their intelligence. He felt his mind working,
everything fitting together. He might once again be close to his family and community, to the nature
he had loved as a child, and help Kokolopori.
He informed himself about conservation projects in Zaire, about the Central Africa Regional
Program for the Environment (CARPE), an initiative launched by the United States Agency for In-
ternational Development (USAID). He inquired about getting grants to work with bonobos, but his
fellow Congolese at CARPE just talked endlessly. He even wrote a project proposal to work with
aphasic children in Kinshasa using Savage-Rumbaugh's approach to language teaching, and sent it
to her.
He and Savage-Rumbaugh began to correspond. He wrote to her that he was returning to Koko-
lopori and intended to observe bonobos in the forests. She'd initially accepted his aphasia pro-
ject but decided that she would rather fund him to look for areas in Kokolopori where there were
bonobos so that she could someday study them in the wild. She gave him $500 to do so.
As Albert returned to Kokolopori, first by riverboat on the Congo River and its tributaries, then
making his way over the dirt trail through the forest on the back of a motorcycle, he recalled his
father's words: that Albert would be the one to stay with his people. It was the first time he under-
stood the statement as prophetic.
